Like the small soft unchanging flower The words in silence speak; Obedient to their ancient power The tear stands on my cheek.
Though our world burns, the small dim words Stand here in steadfast grace, And sing, like the indifferent birds, About a ruined place.
Though the tower fall, the day be done, The night be drawing near, Yet still the tearless tune pipes on, And still evokes the tear.
The tearless tune, wiser than we, As weak and strong as grass Or the wild bracken-fern we see Spring where the palace was. ~Ruth Pitter “On an Old Poem”from Poems 1926-1966
When I write a poem, sometimes, there is a kind of daze that lifts, and I can see what I couldn’t before, as if my mind was in a fog, a cloud, and only wanted
a poem to lift it out. I wanted the rhythm, just the right word, the crescendo from whisper to loud celebration, and found them in the days of trying poems. And I don’t mind telling you: poetry has brought complacency
to a (wanted) end, turned upside-down days aright, settled my unquiet mind, and allowed me to clearly see. ~Monica Sharmanfrom “What Poetry Can Do”
When the world is topsy-turvy and all seems immersed in fog and cobwebs, it helps to put down images and words to clarify and highlight.
Daily I need reminding to stay centered, daily I acknowledge what makes me weep and what is worth celebration.
It is a new day to illustrate with words and pictures what is unchanging in my life: thank God for a new day, everyday.
After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world. Philip Pullman
You’re going to feel like hell if you wake up someday and you never wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart: your stories, memories, visions, and songs–your truth, your version of things–in your own voice. That’s really all you have to offer us, and that’s also why you were born. ~Anne Lamott in a recent TED Talk
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. ~Annie Dillard from “Write Till You Drop”
I began to write after September 11, 2001 because that day it became obvious to me I was dying, albeit more slowly than the thousands who vanished that day in fire and ash, their voices obliterated with their bodies. So, nearly each day since, while I still have voice and a new dawn to greet, I speak through my fingers and my camera lens to others dying around me.
Over the past several months, there have been too many who have met their end sooner than they wished, having been felled by a rogue virus that cares not who or how badly it infects.
We are, after all, terminal patients, some more imminent than others, some of us more prepared to move on, as if our readiness had anything to do with the timing.
Each day I too get a little closer, so I write and share photos of my world in order to hang on awhile longer, yet with loosening grasp. Each day I must detach just a little bit, leaving a small trace of my voice and myself behind. Eventually, through unmerited grace, so much of me will be left on the page there won’t be anything or anyone left to do the typing.
I wanted a horse. This was long after we sold the work horses, and I was feeling
restless on the farm. I got up early to help my father milk the cows, talking
a blue streak about TV cowboys he never had time to see and trying to
convince him that a horse wouldn’t cost so much and that I’d do all the work.
He listened while he leaned his head against the flank of a Holstein, pulling
the last line of warm milk into the stainless bucket. He kept listening
while the milk-machine pumped like an engine, and the black and silver cups fell off and
dangled down, clanging like bells when he stepped away, balancing the heavy milker
against the vacuum hose and the leather belt. I knew he didn’t want the trouble
of a horse, but I also knew there was nothing else I wanted the way I wanted a horse—
another way of saying I wanted to ride into the sunset and (maybe)
never come back—I think he knew that too. We’ll see, he said, we’ll see what we can do. ~Joyce Sutphen “What Every Girl Wants”
I once was a skinny freckled eleven year old girl who wanted nothing more than to have her own horse. Every inch of my bedroom wall had posters of horses, all my shelves were filled with horse books and horse figurines and my bed was piled with stuffed horses. I suffered an extremely serious case of horse fever.
I had learned to ride my big sister’s horse while my sister was off to college, but the little mare had pushed down a hot wire to get into a field of spring oats which resulted in a terrible case of colic and had to be put down. I was inconsolable until I set my mind to buy another horse. We had only a small shed, not a real barn, and no actual fences other than the electric hot wire. Though I was earning money as best I could picking berries and babysitting, I was a long way away from the $150 it would take to buy a trained horse back in 1965. I pestered my father about my dreams of another horse, and since he was the one to dig the hole for my sister’s horse to be buried, he was not enthusiastic. “We’ll see,” he said. “We will see what we can do.”
So I dreamed my horsey dreams, mostly about golden horses with long white manes, hoping one day those dreams might come true.
In fall 1965, the local radio station KGY’s Saturday morning horse news program announced their “Win a Horse” contest. I knew I had to try. The prize was a weanling bay colt, part Appaloosa, part Thoroughbred, and the contest was only open to youth ages 9 to 16 years old. All I had to do was write a 250 word or less essay on “Why I Should Have a Horse”. I worked and worked on my essay, crafting the right words and putting all my heart into it, hoping the judges would see me as a worthy potential owner. My parents took me to visit the five month old colt named “Prankster”, a fuzzy engaging little fellow who was getting plenty of attention from all the children coming to visit him, and that visit made me even more determined.
When I read these words now, I realize there is nothing quite like the passion of an eleven year old girl:
“Why I Should Have a Horse”
When God created the horse, He made one of the best creatures in the world. Horses are a part of me. I love them and want to win Prankster for the reasons which follow:
To begin with, I’m young enough to have the time to spend with the colt. My older sister had a horse when she was in high school and her school activities kept her too busy to really enjoy the horse. I’ll have time to give Prankster the love and training needed.
Another reason is that I’m shy. When I was younger I found it hard to talk to anybody except my family. When my sister got the horse I soon became a more friendly person. When her horse recently died (about when Prankster was born), I became very sad. If I could win that colt, I couldn’t begin to describe my happiness.
Also I believe I should have a horse because it would be a good experience to learn how to be patient and responsible while teaching Prankster the same thing.
When we went to see Prankster, I was invited into the stall to brush him. I was never so thrilled in my life! The way he stood there so majestically, it told me he would be a wonderful horse.
If I should win him, I would be the happiest girl alive. I would work hard to train him with love and understanding. If I could only get the wonderful smell and joy of horses back in our barn!
I mailed in my essay and waited.
Fifty four years ago on this day, November 27, 1965, my mother and I listened to the local horse program that was always featured on the radio at 8 AM on Saturday mornings. They said they had over 300 essays to choose from, and it was very difficult for them to decide who the colt should go to. I knew then I didn’t have a chance. They had several consolation prizes for 2nd through 4th place, so they read several clever poems and heartfelt essays, all written by teenagers. My heart was sinking by the minute.
The winning essay was next. The first sentence sounded very familiar to me, but it wasn’t until several sentences later that we realized they were reading my essay, not someone else’s. My mom was speechless, trying to absorb the hazards of her little girl owning a young untrained horse. I woke up my dad, who was sick in bed with an early season flu. He opened one eye, looked at me, and said, “I guess I better get a fence up today, right?” Somehow, fueled by the excitement of a daughter whose one wish had just come true, he pulled himself together and put up a wood corral that afternoon, despite feeling so miserable.
That little bay colt came home to live with me the next day. Over the next few months he and I did learn together, as I checked out horse training books from the library, and joined a 4H group with helpful leaders to guide me. I made plenty of mistakes along the way, learning from each one, including those that left behind scars I still bear. Prankster was a typical adolescent gelding who lived up to his name — full of mischief with a sense of humor and a penchant for finding trouble, but he was mine and that was all that mattered.
That and a dad who saw what he needed to do for his passionate kid. I’ll never forget.
I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me. ~N. Scott Momaday
If I am brutally honest with myself, one of my worst fears is to have lived on this earth for a few decades and then pass away forgotten, inconsequential, having left behind no legacy of significance whatsoever. I know it is self-absorbed to feel the need to leave a mark, but my search for purpose and meaning lasting beyond my time here provides new momentum for each day.
The forgetting can happen so fast. Most people know little about their great great grandparents, if they even know their names. A mere four generations, a century, renders us dust, not just in flesh, but in memory as well. There may be a yellowed photograph in a box somewhere, perhaps a tattered postcard or letter written in elegant script, but the essence of who this person was is long lost and forgotten. We owe it to our descendants to write down the stories about who we were while we lived on this earth. We need to share why we lived, for whom we lived, for what we lived.
I suspect however, unless I try every day to record some part of who I am, it will be no different with me and those who come after me. Whether or not we are remembered by great great grandchildren or become part of the dreams of creatures in the depths of the seas:
we are just dust here and there is no changing that.
Good thing this is not our only home. Good thing we are more than mere memory and dreams. Good thing there is eternity that transcends good works or long memories or legacies left behind. Good thing we are loved that much and always will be, Forever and ever, Amen.
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Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life –
What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around? ~William Stafford, “You Reading This, Be Ready” from Ask Me
Nearly ten years of daily writing here in this spot:
I have met many people who I will never meet face to face but who share with me their love of the land, their family, their animals and most of all — our Lord.
What do I want to remember?
Mostly, I want to remember your light and love as it finds its way through the darkest and thorniest corners of my life:
a kind word, a silent tear, a crooked smile, a whispered prayer.
What do I want you to remember having visited here?
I want you to remember there is warmth in these words and colors in these photos that don’t come close to what it is like for real.
Mostly, I want you to know that each morning, I send out this love to hundreds I’ll never meet, but who are nevertheless my Barnstorming brothers and sisters.
Carry me with you and pass the light forward. You never know where it might end up.
Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart; The end lost in dream, They float past our view, We only watch their glad, early start.
Freighted with hope, Crimsoned with joy, We scatter the leaves of our opening rose; Their widening scope, Their distant employ, We never shall know. And the stream as it flows Sweeps them away, Each one is gone Ever beyond into infinite ways. We alone stay While years hurry on, The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays. ~Amy Lowell “Petals”
The stream of time flows ever faster, rushing away my remembrance of yesterday, the quiet moments today, my hope for tomorrow. Every day – a petal thrown into the cascade – disappears one by one, never to return. What of my dreams will last as they droop and drop and scatter? It is a lingering fragrance their roots leave behind; that is how to be remembered.
Sometimes I think all the best poems have been written already, and no one has time to read them, so why try to write more?
At other times though, I remember how one flower in a meadow already full of flowers somehow adds to the general fireworks effect
as you get to the top of a hill in Colorado, say, in high summer and just look down at all that brimming color. I also try to convince myself
that the smallest note of the smallest instrument in the band, the triangle for instance, is important to the conductor
who stands there, pointing his finger in the direction of the percussions, demanding that one silvery ping. And I decide not to stop trying,
at least not for a while, though in truth I’d rather just sit here reading how someone else has been acquainted with the night already, and perfectly. ~Linda Pastan“Rereading Frost” from Queen of a Rainy Country.
This morning
poem hopes
that even though its lines are broken
its reader
will be drawn forward to the part where blueberries firm against fingers
say roundness sweetness unspeakable softness in the morning light. ~L.L. Barkat,“This Morning” from The Golden Dress
I want to write with quiet hands. I want to write while crossing the fields that are fresh with daisies and everlasting and the ordinary grass. I want to make poems while thinking of the bread of heaven and the cup of astonishment; let them be
songs in which nothing is neglected, not a hope, not a promise. I want to make poems that look into the earth and the heavens and see the unseeable. I want them to honor both the heart of faith, and the light of the world; the gladness that says, without any words, everything. ~Mary Oliver “Everything”
I’m asked frequently by people who read this blog why I use poems by other authors when I could be writing more original work myself.
My answer, like poet Linda Pastan above is:
Sometimes I think all the best poems have been written already, and no one has time to read them, so why try to write more?
Yet, like Linda, I’ve decided not to stop trying, since I’ve committed myself to being here every day with something that may help me and someone else breathe in the fragrance of words and the world. There are several hundred of you who do take time to read every day – such a privilege to share what I can with you!
Even when my lines are broken, or I say again what another has already said much better yet bears repeating — I too try to write with quiet hands, in reverence and awe for what unseeable gifts God has granted us all.
Let us celebrate by illuminating words and pictures which lift the veil.
And the seasons they go round and round And the painted ponies go up and down We’re captive on the carousel of time We can’t return, we can only look behind From where we came And go round and round and round In the circle game… ~Joni Mitchell “The Circle Game”
those lovely horses, that galloped me,
moving the world, piston push and pull,
into the past—dream to where? there, when
the clouds swayed by then trees, as a tire
swing swung me under—rope groan.
now, the brass beam, holds my bent face,
calliope cadence—O where have I been? ~Richard Maxson “Carousel at Seventy”
photo by Tomomi
photo by Tomomi
Sixty years ago in July, I was a five year old having her first ride on the historic carousel at Woodland Park Zoo before we moved from Stanwood to Olympia. Fifty years ago — a teenager watching the first men walk on the moon the summer I started work as an assistant to a local dentist. Forty years ago — deep in the guts of a hospital working a forty hour shift thinking about the man who was to become my husband. Thirty years ago — my husband and I picking up bales of hay with two young children in tow after I had just accepted a new position doctoring at the local university & we are offered an opportunity to buy a larger farm. Twenty years ago — with three children and our farm house remodel complete, we have three local parents with health issues needing support, helping with church activities and worship, raising Haflinger foals and organizing a summer local Haflinger gathering of nearly 100 horses and owners, planning a new clinic building. Ten years ago — two sons launched with one about to move to Japan, a daughter at home with a new driver’s license, my mother slowly bidding goodbye to life at a local care center, farming is less about horse raising and more about gardening, starting to record life on my blog. Five years ago — two sons married, a daughter off in the midwest as a camp counselor so our first summer without children at home. Time for a new puppy! Now – O where have I been? We can only look behind from where we came.
The decades pass, round and round – there is comfort knowing that through the ups and downs of daily life, I am still hanging on and if I slip and fall, there is Someone ready to catch me.
A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us.
Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. ~Henry David Thoreau from “Simplicity” in Walden.
I’m completely unskilled at doing nothing and have no idea how to go about it.
There is no continuing education course or training in it. I can’t get credit hours for accumulating guilt about wasting time — I get antsy at the mere thought of inactivity. Simply watching the hours pass makes me itchy for productivity.
So I’m practicing at nothing whatsoever this summer, just to see if I’m really cut out for it. I’ve read up on “how to rest”: connecting to nature, taking a break from being responsible, choosing not to be helpful and just remaining still and to be content to watch what is around me. Except for the nature part, I’m an utter failure otherwise.
It starts to feel like work to not work.
Even Thoreau ended up writing down and then publishing his meandering thoughts. Sounds like work to me.
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. ~Robert Frostin a letter to Louis Untermeyer
Spending time away from home has always been difficult for me. I was hopelessly homesick as a child whenever I stayed overnight with a friend or even with my grandma. Going to college two states away was a complete ordeal – it took me much longer than typical to let go of home and finally settle into a new life away from all that was familiar. I really did feel sick clinging too tightly to home base, unwilling to launch, barely able to wave good-bye.
Even now, as I travel away from the farm for a week for this or that, I sometimes get the lump-in-the-throat feeling that I remember keenly from my childhood years — knowing I am out of my element, stretching my comfort zone, not feeling at home away from home.
Will I ever grow out of this now that I’m in my mid-sixties or will it only get worse? Will I ever embrace a lovesickness for the rest of the world?
I keep trying – but the return trip is still the sweetest remedy for this sickness. There’s no place like home…
